Water released from Kalasin dam inundates farms

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Water released from Kalasin dam inundates farms

By The Nation

 

KALASIN: -- Officials accelerated water release from the Lam Pao Dam in Kalasin as upstream waters flooded into the dam, causing some 30,000 rai (4,800 hectares) of rice fields in Muang district to be inundated.

 

Ruechai Jampanil, the director of the Lam Pao River Irrigation Project, said it was necessary to release water at the rate of 20 million cubic metres a day because massive floodwaters from Udon Thani and Sakon Nakhon had flown into the dam.

 

On Saturday and Sunday, a total of 201 million cubic metres of water rushed into the dam, raising its water level to 1.673 billion cubic metres or 80 per cent of its capacity of 1.98 billion cubic metres.

 

Officials said the released water inundated the rice fields.

 

Before the accelerated release of water from the dam, 11 out of 15 districts in Kalasin had already been declared flood disaster zones following torrential rains triggered by storm Sonca.

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/breakingnews/30322330

 

-- © Copyright The Nation 2017-07-31

[amdy2206]

As always, no one knows what they are doing. I can't understand how Thailand can consider themselves hubs for anything when they can't even coordinate their own country

[Sydebolle]

Calculations are easy. Beginning of rainy season you have 20 mio cbm; you need another 80 mio cbm to fill the dam by the end of the rainy season (total capacity 100 mio cbm).

Thailand has quite a good record on historic figures which, in this example would read "expected rain fall 90 mio cbm". In other countries they release today 1/9th of yesterday's rain fall - every day (provided it rained of course). Knowing that ⅓ of the rain falls in the last quarter of the rainy season it is a foolproof method; allowing some fine tune towards the end of the rainy season.

In Thailand though they close all the release valves once it starts to rain and, when the last ⅓ of the rain comes in, they open the valves to avoid overflow. Now, this water release with the rain continuing = floods everywhere. So happened in the past and, unless they start listening to countries who operate dams professionally, it will continue. 

[lvr181]

They do not or are slow to learn.  Very sad for Thai citizens.